Keeping your inventory accurate with Stock Takes by Pimsical

Stock takes probably aren't anyone's favorite retail task.

They take time, they can interrupt the day-to-day running of your store, and when you're relying on paper, spreadsheets or people manually entering numbers, it's surprisingly easy for small mistakes to turn into inaccurate inventory.

But accurate stock counts matter. They help you understand what you actually have on the shelves, spot discrepancies, account for damaged or missing stock, and make sure your Shopify inventory reflects what's really in your store and ensure your business costs are under control.

That's where a good stock take process and the right tools can make a difference.

With Stock Takes by Pimsical, your team can count stock directly from Shopify POS, using their phone or a barcode scanner, and with multiple people counting at the same time. Instead of turning stock taking into a laborious manual exercise, you can make it a much quicker, more collaborative part of running your store.

What does a retail stock take actually involve?

Traditionally, a stock take might mean printing a list, walking around the store with a clipboard and pen, and manually updating your inventory afterwards.

With Stock Takes by Pimsical however, you create a stock take in Shopify, then your team can join it from their POS devices and start scanning and counting. If you have a larger store, multiple team members can count simultaneously!

When everyone's finished, you can review the progress and action the stock take to update your Shopify inventory.

Should you scan every item during a stock take?

There's a trade-off between speed and accuracy.

Stock Takes by Pimsical lets you either scan products individually or manually enter quantities. Manual counting can be quicker, particularly when you have a lot of identical items, but scanning each product gives you another layer of confidence that everything has been accounted for.

For most retailers, we'd recommend scanning where possible. A slightly longer count is usually preferable to discovering later that your inventory is wrong.

Do you need everyone in the store to count stock?

Not necessarily, and that's one of the advantages of being able to use multiple POS devices.

If you're running a larger stock take, you can split the store into sections and have different team members count each one at the same time. What could otherwise be a job for one person can become a coordinated team task.

You can also control who has permission to end and action a stock take, giving managers or admin users control over when the final inventory update happens.

How often should you do a stock take?

There's no single answer.

A full stock take might make sense periodically, but you don't necessarily need to count your entire store every time you want to check your inventory.

You could use smaller, cycle counts or partial stock takes to:

• Check a particular section of your store
• Count newly arrived stock
• Remove damaged or expired products
• Investigate discrepancies
• Keep tabs on products that move particularly quickly

The idea is to make stock counting part of your normal inventory process, rather than a huge event that only happens once or twice a year.

What if your products don't have barcodes?

Stock Takes by Pimsical can use your phone camera or a connected barcode scanner to scan products. Your Shopify products will need unique barcodes for this to work, otherwise all the matching barcodes will be displayed so your team can pick the right item but this does slow down the process.

If you're selling products without existing barcodes, you can create and print your own and add them to Shopify. That means you don't necessarily need to rely on manufacturer barcodes to get the benefits of scanning. However, if you don't use barcodes at all, you can always search and select products by name or SKU as well.

Make stock taking part of your retail routine

An accurate inventory doesn't just help Shopify show the right number. It gives you greater confidence in what's actually happening in your store and with your business.

And stock taking doesn't have to mean closing the shop, handing someone a clipboard and spending hours manually updating numbers.

With Stock Takes by Pimsical, your team can count together, scan products directly from Shopify POS and update your inventory when you're ready.

Less paperwork. Fewer manual updates. More confidence in your stock levels.

Check out our video to find out more about running stock takes.